Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Frequent commenter RetDir mentioned this in a comment on an earlier post-- the Bluewater District School Board Parent, Staff and Community Satisfaction survey has been posted as a PDF file on the board's website. The 91-page report is not for the faint of heart, however has a more digestible executive summary in its first pages.I am reading through the report currently and may add to this post when complete.
So far, I am struck by the common-sense nature of many of the comments in the executive summary. I would, as a skeptic, suspect if you were to do surveys of a similar size and scope at a number of other Ontario school boards you would find very similar results.
As RetDir mentioned, we're more comfortable with our classrooms, teachers and schools and the further away we get from that nucleus the less trust and understanding there is of who people are and what they do.
Despite any additional comments I may add here, the question now remains what the trustees will do with this information. What policies and procedures are they going to change as a result? Further and perhaps more importantly, how are they going to openly and obviously show that they've learned something since April and are working towards addressing the concerns raised from parents and staff? What things will they identify that haven't been done yet but need to be?
No doubt this report will make the rounds through either the Ministry of Education, the Council of Directors of Education (CODE) and/or the Ontario Public School Boards' Association, as this report has a lot to say about this board and by extension many others.

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comments:

I Read the SQE blog - and ER, your suggestion as well that if the same survey was given in other boards you would get the same results. As many of the questions seem to have been developed from surveys that are done in other boards, my hunch would be that Academica has a pretty good idea what, if you will, the industry standard for those responses is, and hence what a good or bad percentage response looks like. FRom eyeballing the Bluewater ones they would seem low.

Other sources for comparative data are readily found on the web: the OISE survey, which is broader than this, and was last completed in 2007: http://www.oise.utoronto.ca/OISE-Survey/2007/survey_final_final.pdfThe Alberta survey: http://education.alberta.ca/admin/resources/satisfaction/education2009.aspxAnd one last one, from a school district in Alberta:http://www.fisherhouse.com/pwsb/aerr2000/fishersurvey.htmlER - a technical question - is it possible to past in web addresses in a clickable form?

Blogger doesn't include a WYSIWYG-style editor for comments, only for me as the author when I create or edit posts.I can't even go back into your comment and do the linking manually myself. The only thing I can do once your comment is posted is delete it.

Or, you can and I just haven't found what little corner of the Blogger world allows me to do this.